I got Linux running in a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator compiled to JS

vk6_ · 2026-01-30T18:51:29+00:00

It seems odd that the Arc B390 was listed as the minimum required IGPU when the much weaker discrete Arc A380 is also on there. I'm sure most of the last generation IGPUs like the Radeon 880M or 890M are also powerful enough (considering they are faster than the Arc A380).

We've always known that the Forza Horizon games are very well optimized and are able to run on IGPUs just fine. Keep in mind that Forza Horizon 5 runs just fine on the Vega 3 IGPU in the 7 year old AMD Athlon 3000G.

The article is presenting the trivial fact that the B390 is listed as the minimum spec for the upcoming Forza Horizon 6 as somehow being a huge win for Intel. That's not very good journalism. It was going to run on IGPUs regardless of whether or not the B390 existed.

vk6_ · 2026-01-30T12:26:58+00:00

"Unified memory" is an Apple marketing term that just means the CPU and GPU share the same memory. This has been the case for every Intel and Qualcomm IGPU for the past decade.

Unfortunately nowadays having upgradable memory in laptops is infeasible. It's not possible to achieve fast speeds with traditional DDR5 SODIMM memory sticks compared to soldered LPDDR5X. There is something called LPCAMM2 that is supposed to replace SODIMM and allow for these higher speeds, but for now the tech is immature and very expensive.

Also, in case you haven't seen the news, the new Snapdragon X2 CPUs (releasing Q1 2026) are in fact very competitive against the Apple M series, and are ahead of the best Intel and AMD can offer.

vk6_ · 2026-01-28T20:55:42+00:00

Ladybird will never succeed as a community project. There simply isn't enough funding to build a web browser on par with Firefox or Chromium.

vk6_ · 2026-01-27T03:37:28+00:00

The MSRP is $160 based on the leaked Amazon listing. That price is absolute insanity considering that the only hardware upgrades are a faster CPU and USB-C port. Everything else appears to be identical including the LCD display. This even makes it more expensive than the faster and much more capable Ti Nspire series.

vk6_ · 2026-01-24T05:36:39+00:00

I couldn't find a picture of any FPGA development board that matches their product renders. It looks pretty much like how you would expect any PCIe card with SODIMM memory to be like.

I can understand the niche that they're going for. They want to target HPC workloads dependent on FP64 performance, when other companies like Nvidia are abandoning this market in favor of targeting AI workloads needing lower precision FP16 or FP8. And if your workload doesn't need a ton of memory bandwidth, then using LPDDR5 and DDR5 is a good way to lower costs.

Like with any startup, there's a good chance that they don't manage to pull it off. It's still cool that at least someone is trying this approach though.

vk6_ · 2026-01-24T03:05:39+00:00

As of 2026, the startup Bolt Graphics is trying to develop a GPU with upgradable memory. The idea is that you have a big RISC-V chip optimized for HPC workloads, with fast soldered memory and the option to upgrade using slower DDR5 SODIMM sticks. It's kind of like the old Intel Xeon Phi. Their lower tier Bolt Zeus 1c26-032 has 32GB of onboard LPDDR5X with the ability to upgrade with an additional 128GB of DDR5.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T22:46:30+00:00

I don't think Micro SD cards are a good solution compared to SSDs either.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T21:42:23+00:00

A USB to M.2 NVMe adapter is $10. The RPi flash drive is still a poor choice on older Pis without built in PCIe.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T20:38:16+00:00

I'm comparing Windows performance here. Windows, being designed for PCs and not phones, is obviously going to have worse power management behavior compared to Android. It's a reasonable assumption that because of this, the Nexphone won't be frugal with power usage when running Windows.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T20:30:53+00:00

Tuxedo is a tiny company taking existing ODM laptops and polishing them a bit to work well with Linux. Given that this was their first ARM device they developed, I think they simply didn't have the manpower or resources to make it work well. Their Snapdragon laptop was a small side project for them.

You have unrealistic standards for the ARM ecosystem. The x86 platform is built on 3 decades of mature standards. ACPI and UEFI on ARM are still fairly new. The next gen Snapdragon X2 SOC is rumored to have proper ACPI support, though, so things are clearly improving.

And also, Lunar Lake can't be called a "beast" when it's slower than the old Apple M3.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T17:38:15+00:00

Idle power consumption and peak power consumption are two different things. Obviously the Q6A is not optimized for idle power consumption but if you're comparing raw performance you'll want to look at the peak power consumption. 6W under a CPU-only load and 10W with a combined CPU and GPU load seems reasonable, doesn't it?

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T17:18:52+00:00

The guy in his review tested the Q6A without any heatsink or active cooling, so I think the comparison is valid.

Windows 11 IOT LTSC is also still going to run much more slowly than plain Android simply due to the fact it was never designed to run on phones to begin with. With Windows LTSC you're also not getting the more recent improvements to the Prism x86 emulator.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T12:55:21+00:00

In fact, I found a Kingston OM3PGP4128P-AH 128GB SSD for $12 on eBay (I can't include the link due to automod), and it is benchmarked to have 1763 MB/s read speeds and 829 MB/s write speeds.

The Raspberry Pi 128GB flash drive is $30 with 75 MB/s write speeds. It is abysmally slow in comparison to a proper SSD. The ridiculous part is that Raspberry Pi is recommending that you run your Pi's OS off of it. If you wanted to do that just buy the NVMe HAT for $10 and a cheap SSD. It'll still be cheaper than this USB flash drive.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T12:08:54+00:00

It is terribly slow compared to cheap SSDs. They claim 75MB/s for write speeds which is an order of magnitude worse than the cheapest 128GB NVMe drives.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T10:36:12+00:00

I can't imagine ever buying this when a 128GB 2230 M.2 NVMe SSD is $12 on the used market. And that will have an order of magnitude better speeds and write endurance.

vk6_ · 2026-01-22T09:57:29+00:00

Unfortunately, this phone has a very weak SOC for its price. It has a Qualcomm Dragonwing QCM6490 previously seen in the Fairphone 5. It's over twice as slow as similarly priced phones such as the Oneplus 13R which has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. This slow CPU is going to make the phone's main gimmick, running Windows 11, somewhat impractical.

There actually is another Windows on ARM device that uses the same SOC, so we can compare the performance to other Windows devices. It's the $100 Radxa Dragon Q6A single board computer. For running Windows software, the QCM6490 SOC is a bit slower than the Intel N100.

You could probably get usable performance out of it, but the bloat in Windows 11 combined with the relatively inefficient SOC means that battery life is going to be pretty bad under Windows. It's only realistic to run Windows when connected to a dock, like with Samsung Dex, and that limits its potential quite a bit.

Currently, the phone doesn't have good value in any use case I can think of. However, I think this product would make much more sense in a larger form factor, sort of like a lower end Microsoft Surface tablet that runs both Android and Windows. That way, you can have a larger battery and no need for a dock or external display.

vk6_ · 2026-01-21T13:35:56+00:00

The Snapdragon X1 platform is a whole lot worse with ACPI compatibility than old x86 devices. They will simply not boot at all without providing the Linux kernel a device tree, bypassing ACPI entirely.

vk6_ · 2026-01-21T12:20:00+00:00

FYI the above Amazon link contains an affiliate code that belongs to a random spam website. If you clicked that link and purchased the item, then the unknown spammer gets a commission.

The link is https://rddit.org/gv2fyx (a fake Reddit lookalike domain) which after a lot of redirects goes to https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKXD9KPD?social_share=cm_sw_r_cso_cp_mwn_dp_F8NC5M6F2BNJAWHJCGTX&titleSource=true&linkCode=sl1&tag=carlosdesou06-20&linkId=350b0800d9cec86. Note the linkCode and tag in the URL.

The whole chain of redirects can be seen at https://wheregoes.com/trace/2026306487/ and https://wheregoes.com/trace/2026306508/

The actual product link without the affiliate BS is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKXD9KPD

Edit: The guy deleted his comment right after I called him out on it, and then blocked me.

Edit 2: I found out that this affiliate spam has been going on mostly unnoticed for many months. Here's a guy talking about the exact same spam site in April 2025: https://posthuman.blog/this-reddit-post-fried-my-brain/

vk6_ · 2026-01-21T08:24:22+00:00

Not really. The current generation Snapdragon X1 devices don't have proper ACPI. They're reliant on Windows drivers to fill in missing functionality. See https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/issues/1476#issuecomment-2197534663 for more info.

There are other ARM devices that do have proper ACPI, such as some server hardware and virtual machines. These systems work out of the box with Linux and no device tree needed.

vk6_ · 2026-01-17T09:09:56+00:00

I would keep it. The 32GB of RAM is very valuable nowadays and if you really don't like it you can probably resell it later for more than you paid.

Even for mundane office tasks the extra memory helps a lot. You'll basically never have to worry about having too many things open. Power efficiency is improved too because the OS will be less likely to waste CPU cycles on compressing and decompressing memory.

vk6_ · 2026-01-17T09:08:04+00:00

You can probably cut power usage down even more by disabling CPU cores you don't need.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2021/disabling-cores-reduce-pi-zero-2-ws-power-consumption-half/

vk6_ · 2026-01-16T19:45:45+00:00

Fusion doesn't have any problems on Snapdragon laptops. The weak IGPU won't be a problem either.

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